


Ecdysis

by rabbit_hearted



Category: Purple Hyacinth - Ephemerys & Sophism (Webcomic)
Genre: But only a little, F/M, This is so angsty, im sorry, its got a hot alleyway kiss tho, this is somehow the softest and angstiest thing ive ever written simultaneously
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-29
Updated: 2020-07-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:20:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25594942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabbit_hearted/pseuds/rabbit_hearted
Summary: "Her stare strikes a memory like a flame against a matchbox. A fine-boned face, conjured from the tentative beginnings of a sunset - pastel pink in her hair and orange in her eyes, like bitter fruit and scorched earth. The viper spins and faces her in a moment of mutual knowingness, the way of predators.”Kym Ladell cheats death, but her near-brush doesn't come without a price.
Relationships: William Hawkes/Kym Ladell
Comments: 19
Kudos: 86





	Ecdysis

_Before she knew the viper, she knew the girl._

Kym Ladell has never been one for gambling — she is, after all, far too cock-sure and short-tempered, hot-blooded and heavy handed, always running headlong in the wrong direction — and today, she hits her betting limit like the crack of a bell. She might have chosen a more glamorous way to die, assuming everything hadn’t gone sideways. But here is what she has been given, wrapped neatly in twine: a metal maw, a gash like a crooked spit of road. A meteoric rise and, just as swiftly, a graceless fall. 

“And now I’m going to die in an alley,” Kym mutters aloud, her narrowed gaze fixed on the slice of blue sky visible between the rooftops. “How cliché.” 

Miles away, her radio crackles in her pocket. There’s a pop of static and then, beneath the din of ambient chatter, a familiar voice: “Kym?” 

_Lauren._ Kym hisses against a rolling tide of pain as she shifts her weight again, trying to maneuver her radio free from her pocket. But her hand won’t cooperate, the digits weighted and lethargic, as though submerged beneath miles of earth. There’s a shuffling on the other end, and, further, the bleat of a siren. “Come on, pick up. We’ve been looking for you for twenty minutes.” 

Something grinds into her temple with the persistence of a jackhammer. The edge of a thought surfaces, thin as a wisp of smoke, but then it is smothered under the pleasantly warm fog that’s settled over her awareness. Sensations cling to her like wet clothes — pretty, transient shapes and images, folded in kaleidoscopic color. 

Like a call through the dark, Kym hears another voice bark out a direction, tone whip-sharp and poised to kill. That unmistakable cadence, quietly commanding, like mist rolling over ice. Bright like a moonbeam, paradoxically cold — the inherent chill that lives in very warm things. _Give the radio to me._

She’s really in for it. 

“Ladell,” Will snaps. “Where are you?” 

Kym blinks, suddenly listless, as though surrendered to something larger than herself. She registers, vaguely, that he’s asked her a question, though it’s distant, spoken through glass. Tipped on the axis of a daydream, she finds herself in a meadow, warmed by the sun on her face, ensconced by overgrowth on either side. A dream — _or perhaps a memory?_ — folds into shape in the ethers of her recollection. 

“Everywhere,” she murmurs. She slides down the wall and rests her cheek against the cool cobblestone. Someone calls her name, though no sensation is quite so resonant as the cold caress of the ground against her cheek. It soothes her burning blood like a salve, aflame in the wake of her own wildfire. It feels prophetic, then, that she’d go this way. These violent delights have violent ends, and Kym Ladell’s have always been self-made. 

And then a warm weight is cupping her cheek, calloused and competent. Rough, like weathered coastline. A voice speaks her name, again and again, like poetry. She wonders if she’s met an angel. 

“An angel, huh?”

When she opens her eyes, the man before her is burnished gold, polished like an epitaph. Two eyes, cut directly from seaglass. A sweep of tangled lashes and a pretty, twisted mouth, bent into a shadow of a frown. “I’ll remember you said that, Ladell.” 

He gingerly props her up in the cage of his arms, and when she groans against a fresh jolt of pain, swift as a thundercrack, he shushes her, warm and close against the conch of her ear. “The ambulance will be here soon. Stay awake.” 

“Hurts,” Kym groans. She turns her face further into the stranger’s chest, all smooth planes and tight angles, as though cut from marble. 

He sweeps a few stray tendrils of hair behind her ear with those nimble, self-assured fingertips. “I know. Stay with me.” 

A memory bobs beneath the surface of her consciousness, nearly close enough to touch before being swept away by a shifting tide. Kym swipes her tongue over her lips, suddenly sandpaper-dry. “How do you know my name?” 

Her handsome stranger says nothing, that cut-glass jaw awash in a pulsating glow of bloodred moonlight, tawny brows furrowed in the most tender expression of concern she’s ever seen. He only swipes the pad of his thumb across her cheekbone, soft as a whisper. 

“So pretty,” she murmurs, and her vision tips into darkness. 

—— 

As it turns out, a silent Kym Ladell is intensely disquieting.

He watches the even cadence of her breaths under the starchy blankets, lily-white and small in the pallid moon’s glow. Her lips are parted slightly, as though lingering on the precipice of a thought. 

“Hey, you.” Lauren’s arm curves around his lower back and Will leans a little into her in reply, gaze still fixed on Kym. His bond with Lauren has never relied on spoken sentiment so much as the sort of quiet honesty and comfortable silence that develops naturally with old friendships. “I didn’t think you’d still be here.” 

Will sighs, palming at the tense muscle in his jaw. “I shouldn’t have let her separate from the patrol. This is my fault.” 

Lauren huffs. “When has anyone ever _let_ Kym Ladell do anything, Will?” She nudges him gently with her elbow. In the hazy reflection of the windowpane his profile is brittle glass, all hard edges and pallor, towhead mussed and off-white in the moonlight. “Don’t beat yourself up. She knew what she was doing.” 

“It’s my duty as Lieutenant to ensure that my patrol runs smoothly.” He murmurs, pulling a heavy hand over his face. “How could I be so _incompetent-”_

“And it’s my duty,” Lauren takes his palm in hers and squeezes, “As _your friend_ to look out for you,” she replies softly. “This isn’t your fault.” A silence settles between them as they watch Kym sleep, still linked by the fingertips like a tether to a buoy. 

“Hey, what did she say to you, back there?” 

“Huh?”

“Right before she passed out.” Lauren tilts her head. “She was saying something to you when I found you two.”

 _So pretty._ Will swallows thickly and shuffles his weight between his feet. “ **Just… nonsense**.” He flicks his palm. “She was out of it.” 

An auburn brow edges into Lauren’s hairline. “Alright.” When she glances to the clock and then back to his face, he knows what she’s going to say.

“I’m staying until she wakes up. You should go.” 

“Will-”

“Lauren,” Will replies, soft and final, like the click of a lock. His smile ripples at the edges, tentative as a fledgling, when he adds, “I’ll handle it.” 

—— 

_She places her in a dream._

_It’s something in the way she moves, pirouetted with the practiced grace of a woman who is aware of her audience. A bespoke memory, or perhaps a requiem: I know you._

_Even yards away, the fox-like slant of her stare strikes a memory like a flame against a matchbox. A fine-boned face, conjured from the tentative beginnings of a sunset - pastel pink in her hair and orange in her eyes, like bitter fruit and scorched earth. The viper spins and faces her in a moment of mutual knowingness, the way of predators._

_——_

Kym surfaces from the crest of a wave. She’s met with the sensation of waking in a place that isn’t your home — like déjà vu in reverse, like drifting backwards into a memory. Pushing aside the stiff bed sheets, she raises herself onto her elbows and then falls back down, just as swiftly. 

“You’re awake -”

“ _Ah_!” Kym’s back collides into the bedframe with a metallic thud, thunderous in the quiet room. Still clinging to the remnants of a dream, she blinks in the darkness, syrupy like midsummer’s balm, like the thick of a storm.

A figure shifts in the chair next to her cot and then extends to full height, long-limbed and lean in the painted shadows, and flicks on the bedside lamp. 

“Calm down, Ladell.” Will’s face is illuminated in a sphere of buttery light, expression tight and unreadable. “Must you always scream?” 

“Apologies, _Lieutenant._ ” Kym replies, pausing to examine the spartan room, all sterile whites and clean edges. Will hands her a paper cup of water and she gulps it voraciously, then wipes her dampened lip with the back of her palm. “I wasn’t expecting a bedside voyeur, and-” she glances at the clock, brow cocked tauntingly, “At such an _scandalous_ hour.”

Will groans into his palms. “I much preferred when you were unconscious.”

“Naturally.” She sets the cup down and leans back, grinding her teeth against the stiffness in her side. “What happened?” 

Will scoffs, dropping heavily back into his chair. “Well, after you made the inane decision to separate from the patrol for _God knows_ what reason,” Something in his jaw clicks as his gaze darts to his shoes. “With no backup, I might add-”

“Well, _excuse me_ ,” Kym cuts in, “I didn’t think that _this_ would happen _-”_

“That’s exactly the point, Ladell. You _don’t think_ \- _”_ He leans forward on his elbows, furious. “You don’t think, and you allow everyone else to worry themselves sick about you.” 

She meets his narrowed gaze, the electric blue of something poisonous, a color that can’t exist in nature without the promise of something wicked. Vicious tides and tart, virulent fruit. At some point, they’ve drawn close to one another, though she doesn’t notice until she’s in the thick of it, until he’s everywhere, branded behind her eyelids like an imprint left behind from the sun. 

“You were stabbed. I found you in an alleyway between Church and Aldersgate.” His gaze grows hazy, like a shadow passing over the surface of a pond. “I’ve never seen so much blood. If I had arrived any later-”

“You didn’t,” Kym interrupts, suddenly incapable of looking at his face. Her gaze, instead, traces patterns in her palms, ruddied where they must have scuffed against the pavement. “Thank you.” A silence swells like vapor, not explicitly awkward, but not inherently comfortable either. 

“I- I don’t know what happened. I _froze_ ,” she hisses. “I never freeze.” 

There’s something about the shape of her mouth. Puckered into a frown, a discordant minor key in a lilting ballad. Aching chill in springtime and blistering heat in winter. Desperation twists in Will’s gut, and he spends a long moment wondering what it might take to see her smile in that familiar way of hers — almost too-bright, like a headlight’s glare on wet pavement. What he might give, then, to capture that wicked glint between his fingertips, even at his own expense. Gaining the attention of Kym Ladell has always been like standing in a sunbeam — beautiful, bright enough to burn. 

“There’s more,” he breathes, suddenly stifled. 

“Out with it, _Willame.”_

Something in the pitch of his brows - folded in and dimpled in the center - seems vaguely familiar to her. “The blade,” he begins, slowly, “Was laced with Golden Viper venom.” 

—— 

_Don’t you know not to go sticking your hand in the viper’s den?_

_Perhaps this is a lesson she’s learned before, in some other iteration. Perhaps her own mercurial heart was the thing that snared her, not the clinch of the trap, not the poison in her veins._

_“You shouldn’t have come here, foolish girl,” says the viper._

_——_

They’ll tell her, later, that she should be dead.

Her prognosis arrives with no fanfare. Instead, it is folded within bated breaths and clinical, measured stares and, worst of all, sympathetic platitudes. No one has survived the viper’s kiss — no one save for Kym Ladell, and it’s a gloryless honor, a broken crown. 

Kym studies the reflection of her arm in the bathroom mirror, tracing the topographical map of burst blood clots, angry purples and blues like vision sparks. 

“What did you do to me?” She whispers, steeling her palms against the edge of the sink. When the door knob twists, Kym pulls her shirtsleeve down and fixes her complexion into something vaguely recognizable. 

She can live with the intermittent heart palpitations, the bouts of insomnia, the vivid, feverish hallucinations. But the most potent effect of the viper’s venom, the one that would flay her mistakes wide and replay the autopsy in relentless perpetuity, in dreamless sleep, would be the loss of mobility in her right arm, perhaps forever. What is, after all, a bloodhound without its scent, a shark without its maw.

A pistol without its marksman.

“What are you doing here?” 

Kym pauses in the threshold to the Precinct’s kitchen. Will watches her placidly, hip cocked against the countertop. He has a way of looking at her that has always made her feel like the cat that’s eaten the canary, which is irritating in and of itself, considering she hasn’t _actually_ done anything wrong. 

“Good morning, Lieutenant.” The edge of her arm brushes against the doorframe, then, and the shock of pain that follows is so arresting that it takes her a long, concerted moment to arrange her features into a mask of indifference. “That’s what polite society calls a _greeting._ You might try it sometime.” 

His eyes narrow, twin blue sparks, like the belly of a storm. “I saw that.”

“Saw _what_?” Kym rolls her eyes and brushes past Will to access the coffee pot. 

“You’re in pain, Ladell. I told you to take the week off, which -” he notices her struggling to reach a mug on the top shelf and leans around her to retrieve it “-was lenient to begin with.” 

Kym blows a long breath through her teeth. “Not you, too, _Willame._ Anyone else’s _pity_ but yours.” She turns back to him, twisting her lips into a hollow grin. “I’ve gotten this far ignoring your advice, and look how it’s worked out for me.” 

“With a stab wound in your arm,” Will deadpans. “So, swimmingly.” 

“Just a flesh wound!” Kym chirps, attempting nonchalance but achieving something vaguely manic. “You worry an awful lot about me, Lieutenant.” She reaches up with her good arm to pinch his cheek. “You’ll get wrinkles.”

Something strange happens, then, a near-imperceptible change in the barometric pressure, a tonal shift that splits the air like a static shock. She’s touched Will like this a hundred times, but this time, it feels different, and she wonders if it’s because the viper has taken something fundamental from him, too.

Kym drops her hand, as though scalded. 

He spends a long moment watching her soberly, those petal-pink lips folded into a neat little line. And then she’s sure that he’s felt it, too, when he lifts his knuckle to her cheek in a touch that can’t technically be called a caress but a mere brush of skin, an exhalation of breath, a shadow passing over a windowpane. 

“Go home, Ladell,” he murmurs. And he leaves her standing alone in the kitchen, wondering where everything went so terribly wrong. 

—— 

_Just before she feasts, the viper asks a question. “Why did you chase me?”_

_“I remembered you,” replies the girl. “From long ago.”_

_——_

Weeks pass like shadows on the wall. Some days are tolerable, and some days she awakes with a phantom pain that splits her in two, cracked clean down the middle. 

Lauren finds her standing in the kitchen amidst the wreckage, shards of ceramic scattered like loose teeth, fingertips still curled around the memory of a mug. 

“Kym,” Lauren says.

Kym closes her eyes, hot with unshed tears, and says nothing. 

—— 

_Before she was the viper, she was simply a girl. She hasn’t forgotten the days they spent like wild things, forged from untamed earth, running unseeingly in the trees._

_“What’s happened to you?” Asks the girl._

_“Everything,” replies the viper. “Everything.”_

—— 

Of course she would return here, to the place that claimed a piece of her. He finds her staring unseeingly at the crooked patch of sky, split between the rooftops like light through closed blinds. 

“Kym-”

She spins, fast and breathless. Her skin burns against his when she crashes into his chest, gripping fistfuls of his lapels in her trembling fingertips. “Why didn’t she kill me? _Why?_ ” 

She’s never looked so beautiful, he thinks, than in this moment, standing in the center of a downpour. Pupils blown wide, lips parted in breathlessness. Hot and reckless and unstoppable, like kinetic energy. Will threads his fingers into her hair as though she is tethering him to the earth, and he’s never felt so out of control and so safely within it, all at once. 

“I don’t know,” he says. 

They come together seamlessly, like the shift of seasons. Perhaps he makes the first move or perhaps she does. Perhaps they meet somewhere in the middle simultaneously, hot atoms exploding into cold ones, together forming a tornado. 

He kisses her hungrily, his tongue edging against hers, pushing in. Tracing, memorizing, knowing — even after he forgets himself, he will remember this: The feeling of Kym Ladell breathing against his mouth, the crash of their hummingbird hearts against one another, warring in that way they always have. Tit for tat, give and take, neither borrowing more than they can handle. Warm tang in the places where they nip against each other’s mouths, painful in the way of something constructive, like salt against a wound.

“So pretty,” he breathes. 

“Stop talking,” she replies, and so he does. 

—— 

_“You remind me of myself,” says the viper._

_“Oh?”_

_“And so I think I will spare you.” The viper bites her then, coldly and without warning. “It isn’t an apology.”_

_“I wouldn’t have thought so,” says the girl._

_——_

“Try again.” 

The bullseye taunts her from the far edge of the range, a blood red beacon. Kym raises her pistol again, head cocked, one eye fallen shut. 

_Bang._

Her aim falls left of center, landing at the edge of the shoulder blade. Kym groans theatrically and lowers her gun. “It’s hopeless, _Willame_. I’m worse than the _fresh meat._ ”

Will snorts. “I doubt that. The other day, one of them told me that their gun was broken.” He rounds the corner and stands beside Kym, grinning boyishly. “It turned out that they’d left the safety on.” 

He looks like something of a vision in his rumpled shirt, cuffed neatly at the elbows. Hands burrowed in his pockets and gold light falling on his face, looking at her as though she is a compass guiding him in the direction of something wonderful. When he moves behind her, the wash of his breath against her ear sends a chill down her spine. 

“Hold still, Ladell,” he murmurs. Those arms — broad and sure and familiar, that phantom touch she recognized even in requiem — move around her, circling her own. He raises their hands together toward the target, and the weight of his palms guides her back, the way he always has. Gently, towards the center: the eye of the storm, the calm amidst the chaos. 

She wonders how she could have been so blind to this — a fated tie, a chemical reaction — for so long. He lets her pull the trigger, and together they hit the target’s center. 

“As it turns out, Lieutenant,” Kym says, “We make a rather good team. We ought to try this more often.” Kym empties the pistol’s chamber into her palm. When he spins her, she feels his smile against her lips, easy, like running water.

“When we aren’t at each other’s throats,” Will agrees. He presses a kiss to her cheekbone, that freckle, like a crescendo to a ballad. When he leans back to study her face, his eyes burn bright with newfound purpose. 

“We’ll find her, Kym,” he says. 

A rush of liquid warmth swells in her chest, nearly overwhelming. “Together,” she whispers. 

Their lips meet in the seal of a promise.

**Author's Note:**

> I’m really into writing dramatic kitchen scenes, huh?
> 
> I’ve been meaning to dive into a KyWi character study for some time now and have been looking for the right reason to do so. The hurt/comfort format seemed like an intriguing catalyst, and then, this happened … sorry for the angst. But, not too sorry. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°). It’s interesting - when I write LauKi, it sort of just spools out of me. This story I wrote in short, feverish bursts, unpredictable bouts of inspiration. The image of Will standing behind Kym at the shooting range came to me in the shower and I grabbed my phone and wrote it into my notepad before it escaped me.
> 
> I should note that this story is super non-canon compliant, ha. It probably doesn’t make sense that anyone would be able to survive Bella’s blade, and I also didn’t want to make Lauren a focal point of this story, so I’m going to pretend that Harvey hasn’t died and that she has no idea who Bella is ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯  
> Thanks for reading! Comments and kudos make me incandescently happy ❤️


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